Winslade thought for a while, rubbing his chin. I wondered exactly what he was going to do to me.

  “There should be a ritual slaying,” Raash suggested. “When a member of our villages is found intolerable by everyone, we make a public example of him.”

  Winslade squinted at the lizard and nodded thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “someone made a suggestion to that effect recently... I’d not thought the idea was really feasible, but I think Raash might have struck upon something.”

  “Uh…” I said, gawking at both of them. Two evil minds were both working up some deviltry with my name on it, and I wasn’t enjoying the process.

  “Yes, yes…” Winslade continued, “McGill, you’ll return to 3rd Unit and resume command. Tomorrow, we’re going to have our first major exercise on Scorpio for this campaign. It’s going to be a different type of competition this time, one that we’ve never done before.”

  “And what,” I asked, “might be the heinous nature of this contest?”

  “I’ll give you a hint,” Winslade said. “You’re going to be playing ‘King of the Hill’. We’ll see just how long you can hold on to that title.” He gave me a grim smile, spun on his heel, and walked back into his office.

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what he meant, and I really didn’t care. I cleared out my desk as fast as I could, before anyone could change his mind. Minutes later, I was marching through the passageways down to the bowels of the ship where my module resided.

  Raash followed after me, bitterly complaining the entire time about a loss of status. He made countless veiled insults concerning my ancestors, who, according to Raash, were all hairless monkeys.

  I didn’t care. I was a free man. “Raash, old buddy,” I said, “I’ve got to tell you, you helped me out today. I’m really glad that you lay out the stinkiest, tarriest goo when you pass waste. Worse than anyone aboard this ship’s ever seen.”

  “You admire my health,” Raash said, “even as I find yours pathetic. The key is to eliminate all vegetation from your diet, and then to increase your grease and fat intake to much higher levels—triple the intake by volume, at least.”

  “Thanks for the tip, Raash.”

  We arrived at my module and were greeted like kings. Leeson looked like he was near tears—tears of relief. Harris seemed to be in the same mood—and Clane? Well, he was unpacking and ripping up his transfer request not two minutes after I showed up.

  “Were you really going to transfer out?” I asked him.

  He hung his head. “Sir, I’m just an adjunct in this outfit, and I’m the junior man. Without your leadership, I’d have to leave.”

  “Good to know,” I told him.

  Then I slammed my big hands together, signaling to everyone that the show was over. They were to get some sleep, polish their weapons and their boots. In the morning, we were heading to Green Deck for a major exercise.

  They all inquired about the nature of this exercise, but I kept them in the dark, not even giving them the ‘King of the Hill’ hint Winslade had given me. I decided it was best to keep them totally surprised. Let them feel good about things for one solitary evening.

  The next day at 0500 in the morning, we were jolted out of our beds by a ship-wide call to arise. We showered, dressed, and marched down for a hearty meal. I became somewhat concerned when I saw there was plenty of fresh fruit and even breakfast steaks to be had.

  “They’re fattening us up,” Leeson said. “Mark my words. This is going to be a doozy.”

  Harris was poking at his eggs, hardly able to eat for worry. “Leeson’s right,” he said to me. “The brass seems to be feeling sorry for us. Are you sure you didn’t do anything bad, sir?”

  “Like what?”

  He shrugged. “Something that would put us on a shit-list? Something that might leave Winslade and the other primus-level folks in a vengeful mood?”

  I shook my head vigorously, denying everything. “Absolutely not,” I told him. “Now, Raash over there,” I said, pointing to where the lizard was heartily munching on what looked like a bowl of mashed insects. He preferred that sort of thing to straight-out beef. “His reputation upstairs isn’t the best.”

  Leeson and Harris glared at Raash after that, muttering dark words. I figured they weren’t talking about short-sheeting the reptile’s rack, either.

  It was pretty easy for me to shift all blame to Raash, so I did it freely. No one seemed to catch on, including Raash himself. He didn’t really care what we humans thought of him.

  After breakfast and a few quick exercises on the drill field, we were marched to Green Deck and positioned in the middle of it.

  I was glad to have a decent-sized Green Deck on this battleship. Scorpio was well-armed with heavy cannons, but she hadn’t originally been designed as a transport vehicle. To our good fortune, deep in her guts she had an extremely large, open, cylindrical cargo hold. They’d decided to convert this space into a novel form of Green Deck.

  Unlike the old design for transport ships, this ship’s largest open area was inside her belly. Instead of having nothing but a glass dome or a force field to shield the occupants of the Green Deck from the harsh radiation and the cold vacuum of space, the hold was well-sheltered.

  “This is really weird,” Harris said, checking the place out. “The floor curves everywhere you look. See that up there!”

  He pointed, and I stared up above us. Weirdly enough, there was a lagoon on what looked to be the ceiling.

  “I’ll be damned…” I breathed.

  The entire deck curved in every direction, and it was all overgrown with jungle-like growths. Once the doors were sealed, you could essentially run forever in any one single direction of the compass, traveling around the rounded interior of the cylinder. If you ran long enough, you’d eventually come back to the point where you had started. We were essentially on the inside of a bubble-like surface, the walls of which formed the floor in every direction.

  “I feel like if I jumped,” Harris said, “I’d fly right up there and fall into that lake.”

  “Why don’t you try it?” Leeson suggested.

  Harris glared at him, and the two began an argument.

  “We’re going to have to fight this one differently,” I told them. “Tactically, I mean. What would you say that range is?” I asked, pointing up toward the ceiling.

  “I don’t know. Something like six hundred meters or so.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “something like that. Between six hundred and a thousand, well within snap-rifle range.”

  “That must be the reason why we didn’t get any rifles,” Leeson complained.

  That brought my attention back down to the ground around me. A weapons rack had rolled up and landed in front of us. We examined the armaments with dismay.

  We’d expected to find maybe plasma rifles, or at least snap rifles—but no, neither one was to be found. We were issued a combat dagger and a spear each—an honest-to-God spear.

  We checked the points and found the tips were at least molecularly-aligned. They were quite capable of punching through a breastbone or an intervening tree if we threw it hard enough. But still, these were not encouraging weapons.

  “No guns, huh?” Sargon said, going through the racks and eyeing each one carefully.

  He chose one he found to be perhaps more balanced than the rest. I had respect for Sargon. He was probably my most athletic and capable fighter when it came to primitive melee weapons like these. He was also deadly with a javelin. I pointed up at the lake above us on the ceiling of the vast cylinder. “Do you think you could throw a javelin all the way up there?”

  Sargon looked up seriously and eyeballed the distance.

  “Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so. I know what you mean. The gravitational pull in here is light, and if I threw it with enough force and it got to the halfway point, it would be grabbed by the gravity pull of the opposite side and drawn down to ground over there. But I don’t think I could do it. Just given the heft of this spear and the distance, I’m thinking I could maybe manage a two-hundred-meter cast. But reach the far side? No way. Even with the low grav, it’s just not going to happen.”

  I nodded, and I passed on that tactical idea. I’d kind of hoped to spot enemies on the opposite side of the cylinder and shower them with spears from range.

  “Okay,” I said, “everybody take a spear and a knife and follow me.”

  “Where are we going, sir?” Harris asked.

  I pointed with my javelin directly toward the region near the lagoon we could see up on the roof. “That hill, gentlemen, is our new kingdom. Right above where the waterfall gushes out into the lagoon.”

  “Ah, I get it,” Leeson said in disgust. “So, we’re the kings of that hill, is that it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the other fuckers will be another unit coming in here, trying to chase us off the high ground. Right?”

  “That’s it, Adjunct,” I told him.

  I began walking, but Leeson kept standing there and squinting at our destination. “Wait a minute,” he said, “this all sounds way too good to be true.”

  “What are you talking about?” Harris demanded. “It sounds totally fair to me.”

  Leeson ignored him. “Graves isn’t going to let us squat up on those rocks, throwing darts down at a pack of losers charging up after us. There’s no way Winslade and the rest of those bastards would give us a setup like that.”

  “You’re right, Adjunct,” I admitted, deciding it was time to come clean and hear the whining. I’d read just the beginning paragraph of the morning brief, which had contained the rules and details of this exercise. “It’s not quite that simple. It’s going to be us up against everyone else.”

  They all squawked in dismay. “Everyone else? You mean the whole legion?”

  “No, not the whole damn legion,” I said, “just our cohort.”

  This was still met with groans and howls. There were ten units in our cohort. We were to play King of the Hill against a total of nine other units, each consisting of about a hundred and twenty men. It was going to be their job to knock us off and take on the role of King themselves. The winner would be, of course, the last unit to hold the hill and defend it against all others.

  “We’re starting off first?” Harris demanded, enraged. “That’s a frigging death sentence! Why can’t everyone start at the base of the hill or something and charge up, fighting each other for the top? That would be way more fair.”

  “It would be,” I told him, “but Graves knows we’re the best. 3rd Unit is unbeatable in any normal exercise. For that reason,” I lied, “he’s decided to give all his other pathetic losers a fighting chance. We’re starting at the top, and if any of them can eject us, well, then I guess we’re not as good as he thinks we are.”

  This mollified some of the cowardly, and most of my men seemed to buy my bullshit more or less. But still, they grumbled and lamented the fact that we were almost assuredly going to be left face down on those bloody rocks before this day was done.

  -18-

  The new scenario on Green Deck was utterly unfair. We were given a twenty-minute head start and a kick in the pants. We hustled toward our new kingdom, a big pile of boulders in the center of the vibrant, leafy space.

  Essentially, we were sitting ducks parked next to a big lagoon. The only positive was the lagoon itself, which formed a body of water that curved in a crescent around our hill, giving us pretty good coverage on one flank.

  My troops hiked up onto the pile of boulders, which were mostly fake puffcrete shells. They served the purpose nonetheless, and we squatted up there, lamenting our fate. I silenced all the complaints by banging my hands together and demanding my officers attend me.

  The non-coms automatically gathered as well, and within a few seconds, I had pretty much everybody who mattered in the legion listening closely.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, “you can stop crying for your mamas now. We’ve got ourselves a situation, and—”

  “No shit…” Harris muttered.

  I glared at him until he looked down, then I continued. “Here’s how this is going to kick off. Every other door all the way around Green Deck is going to open in about ten more minutes.”

  A general groan rose up. The biggest complainers in the unit, such as Carlos and Leeson, were especially loud.

  “This is so typical,” Leeson complained. “Absolutely typical. Again, we’re singled out and punished.”

  “What I want to know,” Carlos said, “is just what our illustrious centurion did to earn us this horrific fate today?”

  “Yeah…” a few people muttered.

  “What about that, Centurion?” Carlos called up to me.

  I glared at them until they shut the hell up. “If anyone else wants to mouth off, let me know right now,” I told them. “All the crybabies are going to find themselves standing in front of one of those doorways when the enemy emerges, lusting for your blood.”

  That threat shut them down right-quick.

  “All right then, here’s my plan,” I began. “We don’t have to worry about the units coming in on our six, where the lagoon protects us. It’ll take them longer to get here, and with any luck, they’ll run into each other and fight each other. The ones we’ve got to concern ourselves with are the ones that are directly ahead.”

  I pointed toward the nearest portals. From the rocky hilltop, you could see them. The gray, metal, round doors stood out as barren spots in the foliage.

  “Here’s my idea. I’m going to send out our ghosts, who I’ve noticed were issued their stealth gear. We’re going to place them between the nearest doors, right out there,” I pointed to a spot a half kilometer or so away.

  “We’re to deploy right in the path of the enemy?” Della said. She was invisible, but she was here, and she was listening. “What exactly did we do to deserve this fate?”

  “At least it’ll be quick,” Cooper remarked.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Carlos chimed in, lighting up. “Throw the ghosts out there, way out there. Distract, delay, skirmish. Just throw rocks at their butts, or something. Give us a little more time.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not exactly how it’s going to go,” I clarified. “What the ghosts are going to do is try to get two of the units to fight.”

  “The way I recommend doing it,” Harris chimed in, suddenly catching onto my idea and liking it, “is you don’t hit them from the front, see. What you do is you trail the fastest unit that enters the zone and then make an attack on their rear.”

  Everybody was listening to him now, because Harris was well known as the unit’s master of dirty play. His eyes lit up as he described it.

  “You see, you’ve got to be into the psychology of this,” he explained. “That front group, they’re going to be thinking, ‘I’m heading right for that rock, and I’m going to nail McGill.’ But very unfairly, they’ll get hit in the ass. Now, they’ll naturally assume, since you’re going to be kissing the dirt as fast as you can after casting that one spear, that it wasn’t us that did it. It had to be those dirty guys behind them.”

  “I like it,” I said, pointing a big finger his way and waving it around. “There are a lot of units out there. They’ll all be converging on us at the center. Just get between two of them, and bam! Nail one straggler. When he goes down, that unit will assume they’re getting attacked from behind…”

  “You’ve got it,” Harris said, nodding vigorously. “They’ll turn around, all pissed off. It’ll be beautiful.”

  We thought about his idea, and all of us liked it. I gave the orders to capitalize on Harris’s plan. My two scouts were muttering curses to themselves, but they hustled back toward the entrances. Della and Cooper soon disappeared from sight. I couldn’t even see any leaves moving as their stealth-suited bodies glided through the ferns, rocks and fake banana trees.

  “What about the rest of us, Centurion?” Leeson asked.

  “The rest of us want to be as invisible as possible,” I said. “Find cover. Any kind of cover. The most important thing is that no one should be able to see you except possibly from directly above,” I pointed. “We don’t have much to hide under, but we’re going to try. Cut up some ferns and big palm fronds. Drag them over here and cover us. We’re going to get in between these puffcrete boulders, lay on our bellies and be as quiet and invisible as possible.”

  People grumbled, but they didn’t argue much. At least they had something to do. Using the monofilament blades we’d been equipped with, we hacked branches from all the nearby trees, dragged dozens of big palm fronds and even whole saplings over to decorate our pile of rocks.

  The rocks themselves afforded a lot of cover. They were arranged with tunnels and pockets between them. They weren’t real rocks lying on real dirt. Instead, they were essentially a fake pile of rounded, hollow puff-crete shells. Puff-crete was much lighter than any such boulder had any right to be, but harder than granite. It was kind of like hiding in a pile of giant petrified meatballs.

  Once we’d all gotten hunkered down in the shade, hiding in every crack between our fake rocks, a voice rolled out over the vastness of Green Deck.

  “Legion Varus,” Graves announced. “I’m officiating today as all the participants are members of my cohort. Note the timer in the center of the chamber. You don’t have all day.”

  A big set of blue digital numbers glowed into existence. It was a hologram of a clock, and it said 59:59, a timer that was frozen. The digits shimmered in the air unnaturally.

  “As a reward for being the last unit to fully muster out in this cohort,” Graves continued, “3rd Unit, being led by Centurion James McGill, has earned the honor of being our first King of the Hill. It’s the job of all the other centurions to pull him down from his throne. Open the doors and let the games begin! May the last man alive be King of the Hill!”

  Resounding clangs echoed across the massive chamber. We looked around wildly, craning our necks and gawking. The timer overhead began ticking away the seconds. A whole hour… how could we hold out for that long? It seemed impossible.